I’ve been having trouble being motivated to post of late. It’s not writer’s block; I’ve never been subject to that. Nor is it a want of topics. I just tossed a post idea, shredding a Financial Times exercise in propaganda masquerading as a “Big Read” on the Ukraine war, to another writer, who quickly took it up. Similarly, there is so much wrong about the recently-published National Security Strategy that it has elicited a boatload of commentary, with only a limited amount of overlap in critiques.1 Or how about the ridiculous Trump/Bessent idea that a pep talk from them will get consumers to ignore the budget stresses they feel every day?
But I realized that the root of my resistance to writing was a deeper emotional reaction: revulsion. Revulsion at the wanton destructiveness of our soi-disant betters, who are smashing lives and institutions and countries out of entitlement, hubris, laziness, and incompetence. I grew up at the tail end of the era where most communities were led in large measure by local elites, WASP-y men who resisted letting others into their clubs. But nevertheless, they generally accepted the idea of noblesse oblige: that they needed to keep up appearances of legitimacy, which meant taking some interest in the welfare of the societies in which they lived, and looking like they deserved the mantle of leadership (as in no visible cheating on cards or in their business/personal affairs).
Many in the crosshairs of today’s grossly derelict leadership don’t have luxury of having disgust as their strongest emotional response. They often report fear, anger, and despair at everything from the loss of jobs to essential benefits like healthcare and medication to threats to personal safety from ICE raids to in the UK incarceration for support for Palestine, or a gnawing sense of impending doom on many fronts, from climate change to AI eating all the jawbs to Social Security and other nations’ pension systems being on the chopping block. And for those who have felt revulsion, above all at the genocide in Gaza, there have been some outlets for action even if they have so far had limited effect, namely protests and supporting BDS.
But what is disturbing is the underlying, pervasive nihilism in the reckless disregard for the well-being of populations and institutions. Trump’s National Security screed prattles on about ushering in a golden age (for him, perhaps) and seeing “to remain the world’s most scientifically and technologically advanced and innovative country” after launching an ideological war on universities, slashing science funding, and actively driving out foreign students and academics. This isn’t eating America’s seed corn; it’s setting a bonfire to it. You can’t blame this level of stupidity on late-stage capitalism; it’s breaking things because he and his lot can and think they will show the former guard a thing or two. Yes they are, but not in the way they tell themselves. If things were working out all that well for the elites, would they need as many panic rooms? Bunkers in far-away places? And let us not forget that highly unequal societies impose a lifespan cost even on those at the top.
On the other side of the pond, leaders like Keir Starmer and Freidrich Merz are wrecking their social orders by doubling down on militarization and de-industrialization rather than renounce their deep personal commitments to Project Ukraine. President Johnson had the decency not to seek a second term when he realized voters had turned against him over his support for the war in Vietnam. They could even have ju-jitsued Trump by not only following his lead in trying to end the Ukraine conflict but going one further: “If we are going to normalize relations with Russia, why do we need to spend 5% of our GDPs on defense? Wouldn’t 2% to 3% suffice?” Instead, we are subjected to Ursula von der Leyen defying not just Euroclear and the Belgian government, but also the ECB and the IMF in trying to grab frozen Russian assets….which would only enable a limited prolongation of the war yet would severely damage Europe’s status as a safe place to do business and likely the value of the euro.
I suspect those who have had similar reactions to mine have different triggers. For instance, the interviewees on Judge Napolitano skew to those with military and intel experience. Many seemed to recoil at the Hegseth-Trump trying to evoke the movie Patton in speeches both gave at Quantico to an unprecedented assemblage of generals and flag officers, where the purpose seemed to be to rant about DEI and niceties like observing modern norms and rules for conducting war. That reaction in that cohort seems to have intensified over the Administration blowing up boats of Venezuelan fisherman to compensate for its impotence in assassinating or otherwise removing President Maduro. For instance:
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) said the video of the September 2 strike on an alleged narco boat is “one of the most troubling things” he’s seen during his time in public service.
READ MORE: https://t.co/M6F0E97ikh #hegseth #venezuela #boatstrike #news #politics pic.twitter.com/Oi6x2WYjA3
— The National Desk (@TND) December 5, 2025
Now to La Grande Bouffe, a 1973 film which achieved its aim of being utterly revolting. It shows four well-off men who decided to kill themselves by overeating and how they went about it.2 I must confess to never having seen the film3 but reviews give an idea of how gross the movie was (the trailer opts for being wry). First from Wikipedia:
The film tells the story of four friends who gather in a villa for the weekend, with the express purpose of eating themselves to death..
The first protagonist is Ugo, owner and chef of a restaurant, “The Biscuit Soup”. The second is Philippe, a somewhat important magistrate who still lives with his childhood nanny, Nicole, who is overprotective of him to the point of trying to prevent him from having relationships with other women, and who fulfills her own sexual needs with him. The third character is Marcello, an Alitalia pilot and womaniser. The fourth and final main character is Michel, who is an effeminate television producer. The four come together by car to the beautifully furnished but unused villa owned by Philippe. There they find the old caretaker, Hector, who has innocently prepared everything for the great feast….
The first to die is Marcello, after being enraged with his own impotence; he goes to the toilet and causes the sanitary pipes to explode….He becomes exasperated, and realizing the futility of the farce, decides to leave the house at night during a snow storm, in the old Bugatti that he had repaired earlier in the day with great delight. His friends find him the next morning, frozen to death in the driving seat…
After Marcello comes Michel…Already suffering from indigestion and crammed to capacity with food (he cannot even lift his legs practising dance, his favourite pastime), he suffers an attack of bowel movements while playing the piano. Amid flatulence and worse, he is finally able to let it all go, and collapses on the terrace…
Ugo prepares an enormous dish made from three different types of liver pâté in the shape of the Dome of Les Invalides, which he serves to the remaining diners, Philippe and Andrea, in the kitchen in view of the two dead friends… Philippe and Andrea cannot bring themselves to eat it. Philippe goes off to bed, leaving Andrea to keep Ugo company during his determined effort to eat the entire pâté. Some time later, she later calls Philippe back downstairs to help her stop his friend from stuffing himself to death. They cannot dissuade Ugo, and end up attending to him on the kitchen table, the one feeding him, the other masturbating him until he orgasms and dies at the same time….
The last to die is the diabetic Philippe, on the bench under the lime-tree of Boileau and into the arms of Andrea, after eating a pudding she has made shaped like a pair of breasts.
And from Wies Sanders in 50 years La Grande Bouffe:
The film La Grande Bouffe is a cynical indictment of the unforeseen negative consequences of the Trente Glorieuses, a period without war, but also without tradition or meaning. In the film, four highly educated, rich white men eat themselves to death. They don’t do much more than that and they do it without apparent reasons or a preconceived purpose. It simply arises from a decadent boredom that naturally accelerates and can only be stopped by death. Freed from norms and traditions, the four men appear unable to cope with the resulting meaninglessness. Boundless hedonism may initially seem like heaven, but in reality turns out to be hell.
It was a high-grossing film in France and did indeed deeply offend many:
And actress Andréa Ferréol says: “For months, restaurateurs told us that they refused to serve us. One evening I was at an Italian restaurant with a friend. A few customers stood up and the man came over and said, “Since you’re here, ma’am, I’m leaving!”” It is not surprising: the film shows many taboos: waste, excess, shit, vomit, boredom, nudity and whores.
I supposed the reason for connecting my having hit disgust overload to La Grand Bouffe is of informational force-feeding, like a duck being noodled, and that it’s getting worse. I’m not alone in seeing the Administration’s offenses becoming more frequent and intense. Sections from a new must-read piece by Andrew Coyne, Donald Trump – and American democracy – is getting exponentially worse, in the Globe and Mail (hat tip Dr. Kevin):
A point I have tried to make over the last year or so is that Donald Trump can only get worse: that however corrupt or incompetent or dictatorial or treasonous or insane he may appear at any given moment, it will inevitably come to be seen as a relative golden age beside what is to come.
There is a reason for this. It is that he can only stir the media and establishment outrage on which both he and his supporters thrive if he behaves even worse than we are accustomed to him behaving. It is not enough to say or do some appalling thing, even if it would have ended the career of any previous politician. He does that, quite literally, several times a day. Rather, he must exceed expectations of his grotesquerie. His critics’ dilemma – how to sustain outrage in the face of the constant, numbing, normalizing stream of objectively outrageous conduct – is also, in a way, his….
What I had not anticipated was the second derivative. After a time, that is, people come to expect, not just bad behaviour, but steadily worsening behaviour. So to keep feeding his outrage addiction, Mr. Trump’s behaviour not only has to keep getting worse, but to do so at an ever accelerating rate. And, I suppose, the rate of acceleration must also increase, and the rate of acceleration of the rate of acceleration, and so on. We are in a kind of hyperinflation of presidential derangement, an exponential curve asymptotically approaching Nero.
Contra La Grande Bouffe, our narcissistic misleadership class members would never set out to kill themselves. But their orgiastic love of power, unbounded by any deep sense of purpose or responsibility, is producing similar outcomes for their rule, their records, and their nations. How can they, for instance, have failed to subdue Russia and not exhibit any interest in getting facts as to why their schemes have not worked? How can they still be relying on Ukraine propaganda? Hadn’t the mystery of Putin and Russia unbowed elicited some doubt and resulting sanity-checking?
Admittedly, one reason is the way that very same narcissism has produced deep embubblement, that they have surrounded themselves with toadies who won’t tell them that it’s painfully obvious that they are amateurs, way out of their depth. Consider this wince in comments from Aurelien about the then 28-point peace plan:
And I just have to say that every time I look at this list I’m astonished by how amateurish it is. It’s not simply that the US is trying to commit other nations, and international organisations, to things, but most of the points are political commitments which may be reversed at any time, and some things are simply wrong: there’s no question of Ukraine signing the NPT, it did that in 1993. And a “security guarantee” for Ukraine would be meaningless unless it were backed by military force, which is the one thing the West doesn’t have. The whole thing is so unprofessional, it hurts.
And to turn to a completely different sort of lack of reality among those who should know better, consider AI. I had mistakenly thought of it as a mere equity mania, which means it could produce a serious economic downdraft but not a financial crisis. But the fact that major players are using off-balance sheet vehicles to borrow changes the picture completely. A meltdown or Japan-style deflation/zombification are all too possible. And the US does not begin to have Japan’s level of social cohesion.
It may seem unduly finance-fixated to be concerned about the level of capital destruction, but again, the Great Depression, Japan, and the long-term consequences of the bank-sparing response to 2008 (in particular, the continued great increase in inequality) show these unwinds harm (pretty much) all of society. And if the AI touts are actually proven correct, we can look forward to the AI-induced dislocation of high unemployment among the educated.
Ed Zitron provides a good review of his extensive writings on how the AI hype, particularly its economics, don’t begin to add up.
One particularly important tidbit, that many of the chips purchased are apparently being warehoused. And GPUs are on a planned one-year development cycle, with maybe 3 years of use. They are wasting assets. At 24:25.
Newsweek: What happens if what happens when the music stops?
Zitron: Well, there are a few problems. So, first of all, there there’s this stat that came out. I think it’s reaffirmed by a professor as well where it was AI capex and spend on data centers accounted for more of GDP growth in the first half of this year than all consumer spending combined. That’s incredible because our entire economy is predicated on consumer spending which is what’s crazier though is Nvidia claimed about a month ago that they’ve shipped 6 million Blackwell GPUs. That’s the newest generation. Now I went and did the maths on this. It’s about 6 GW to 12 GW of IT load, which just means power. We haven’t built that many data centers. We haven’t even built a quarter of that. So, not only is the biggest company on the stock market only getting there because of selling GPUs, but I’m suspicious as to whether those GPUs have gone anywhere, whether those GPUs are they’re not in data centers. The data centers don’t exist. The power doesn’t exist, but the physical data centers don’t either. So 6 million of these bloody things holding up our markets, they’re sitting in warehouses.
And at 48:05:
Zitron: But a really simple thing is when there’s enough money and a good justification of something, you don’t have to like get the runes and the spells out. You don’t have to get a shaman. You don’t need a wizard to conjure the money up and create some obtuse debt vehicle. If it if this was the future, why isn’t it on your balance sheet, mate? And the answer is Meta makes no money from AI. Zip. They all it does is…
Newsweek: They make money from ads just like they have been for whatever 10 years.
Zitron: They’re claiming, oh, we’ve seen 5% increase from generative AI ads. Bull, I’m sorry. Show me actual numeric like money. Money. Show me the money. And they never will. They never will. They changed how they met Meta changed I think late last year from how they measure active users. It’s like daily active people now. They moved the around.
Newsweek: It’s like how Netflix does it with like the watching hours or they all move. It’s all fake.
Zitron: It is. And but on top of this, it’s all fake but used to buy because all these companies Microsoft, Meta, Google, they used to be awesome because awesome financially, I guess, because their cash flow was just there and they didn’t sink hundreds of billions of dollars into GPU. They weren’t asset heavy. Now they’re asset heavy businesses. Software is meant to proliferate endlessly…And now they’re just attached to a bunch of GPUs. They Microsoft owns hundreds of thousands of old generation GPUs. There’s a thing called an impairment. When something loses its value, you have to mark it down. One of those is coming for all of them cuz they all own A100 GPUs, H100 GPUs, the ones that came out in 2020 and 2021. >> And those are just basically paper weights now. >> Well, they still work. They still work, but not for like not for long. And also, if they still work way behind the new ones, it there’s it’s not really clear why anyone’s doing anything.
A confirming tidbit:
This is the AI revolution in a nutshell:
– Only ~10% of the committed data center build outs are actually underway
– Circular financing is being used to manufacture demand
– Data centers are already waiting years for grid access
– Gas turbine order books are beyond production… pic.twitter.com/gAY59fLWHd— Lukas Ekwueme (@ekwufinance) December 5, 2025
As you know, the foregoing is only a tiny subset of the official sadism and stupidity. ICE raids. Crypto grifting. Indifference to the baked-in health train wreck in 2026 due to premium increases. Tariff-induced cost increases wrecking small businesses. Trump’s ongoing petty vengefulness.
So I understand why some of you feel the need to take news breaks. But remember, if we don’t keep watching and make what noise we can, things get worse at an even faster rate. Trump for all his bunkering still apparently cares about polls, so noticing and amplifying evidence of his Administration’s incompetence and corruption does have an impact.
So resort to your preferred remedy, be it a stiff drink, exercise, meditation, or binge watching cat videos, and steel your nerves.
________
1 Amusingly, the documents lists Cambodia and Thailand as the first of the spots where Trump asserts that he “negotiated peace”. From the Bangkok Post PM promises ‘necessary military response’ to Cambodian attacks, followed by the breaking story in the Nikkei: Thai military launches airstrikes on Cambodia as cross-border clashes erupt
2 Only three succeeded; one froze to death.
3 It did not make it to the art house theater in Yellow Springs, where I regularly went with my debate team buddies in high school.
Just an initial comment. The plot of the film “La Grande Bouffe” is based on four men who overeat themselves to death simply through decadent boredom and you say to yourself that boredom can’t get people to do such things and it is just fiction. Not so. In the 19th century you had military detachments spread throughout the Russian empire and the boredom in these isolated detachments was inescapable, especially in winter. So some officers to alleviate the boredom played ‘Cuckoo.’ Two officers would enter a room at night that would be completely dark with each armed with a pistol. One officer would go ‘Cuckoo!’ and the other officer would try to shoot him based on that sound. If he missed, then it was his turn to move around and call out ‘Cuckoo!’ Boredom can actually make you do crazy stuff.
The French Army had “Le Cafard,” a boredom so intense that soldiers shot themselves.
See: https://www.thoughtco.com/avoir-le-cafard-1371109
Also: http://www.kaiserscross.com/40312/617301.html
They did similar things in Vietnam, I’ve read, but high on drugs…
Nobody really trying to start a chamber music quartet or quintet or a choir or something…
Does chess count?
War is an organized bore
I had a guitar player buddy who told me his brother working in a lumber camp in British Columbia told him the boredom had them hunting eact other with live ammo in the woods. Crazy.
When I was 22 I learned to use email. Pretty cool, and pretty useful!
My 22 year old son texted me this weekend that he had learned how to defuse a tear gas grenade. Also pretty cool . . . and sadly these days, pretty useful
Yves. Thanks for naming what I’ve been feeling for a year. Some days, I can barely function for the insanity in this country.
Great essay, Yves!
The wilderness is my fallback position, everything is truthful in the back of beyond humans. Oh there’s subterfuge here and there among Mother Nature’s many clients, well practiced over the last million years give or take.
Money can’t buy you a thing in the wild, so its woefully uncorrupted.
The only misers I ever come across tend to be woodpeckers who often put away quite a stash of acorns that often are never retrieved, almost like us with our wealth that sticks around when we pass on, for those well heeled enough.
Yves, you’re not alone in that. I was keeping up weekly Substack posts for most of two-and-a-half years, but since September, bupkis. To post steadily you have to have some degree of bedrock optimism about the country. Such optimism is, to say the least, in short supply.
Whatever else, Biden was worse. I honestly believe that we´d be approaching WWIII if this bullet had hit Trump. I’ve got to know quite a few of the Nuland and Green German types. The Biden allies are still in power in Europe and look at them. Basically the system is unfixable and needs to crash before something better can come up. I view Trump as the wrecking crew and at least in Ukraine the change was felt immediately. I was there in February when US aid to all the war mongers was stopped and boy, was there a wailing by the grant eaters and Sorosites. What wonderful sound that was!
Your e-mail address suggests you are not in the US. Biden for all of his very many faults was not applying wrecking balls to important American institutions and tearing down safety nets to benefit the rich, and openly grifting. Biden did like many Congresscritters get far too wealthy while in office but the scale was far less than what Trump has done in less than a year in office.
Second, Trump has not ended or even dialed down the war. We are still doing targeting for Ukraine. Neither he nor Harris could have gotten a new weapons authorization passed in Congress; American voters were sick of all the money going to Ukraine.
But the difference is that Biden had the support of the NYT and the rest of the “liberal” establishment whereas Trump’s grotesquerie is obvious to everyone except those who who think he is feathering their nest–i.e. the ZH crowd. Also it’s very likely that Trump is losing it cognitively while insisting on staying in the public eye rather than remaining hidden away like Biden. He is what he always was which is an actor playing a part and hoping for big applause. Here’s suggesting that when his approvals sink low enough he will either change or be gone. The swamp will remain and they are the bigger problem.
Tucker Carlson shows have a bigger audience than Fox shows (although Fox has more views in aggregate due to more content). Candace Owen’s viewership is even larger.
Younger people do not get news from legacy outlets like the New York Times.
Trump’s support is falling not due to media criticism but Trump policies that have produced continued inflation, immigration raids, employment losses and wage interruptions (Federal employees like TSA employees working for no pay) and the impact of tariffs on small businesses.
A couple weeks ago I dropped off food at our food bank and talked to the guy in charge, who told me for the first time ever, they had full-time NPS employees from Sequoia NP that needed assistance in being to being able to feed themselves, on account of the shutdown and no pay.
Same here, the local food bank is very busy. The county backbone is three big naval bases so it’s active duty, civil servants, gov. contractors, etc. We asked what was needed and the lady asked for cat food because people cannot afford to feed their pets either. Well, hopefully that means they had enough food.
The local news:
Bremerton Foodline braces for continued demand despite end of government shutdown in sight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhLbffILN-s
I imagine this is now very common everywhere.
I am not in the US and haven´t been there for ten years although having spent part of my youth there. So I will certainly not contradict you about Biden vs Trump concerning US politics. I was though quite a few years in Russia and I am certain that Biden (really only a symbol – I mean people like Nuland and Hilary) was very very dangerous. Trump once answered when asked, whether Putin was a killer: we have quite a few killers ourselves. That is the reality and I prefer somebody who is reality based to people who think they have the moral high ground.
Apart from that I do believe the system is unfixable. The US spends 17-18 percent of GDP on healthcare. Which is nearly double what other “First World” nations spend. Cuba’s spending is only a fraction and and its life expectancy is HIGHER than in the US.
Still I believe in the US. It can fix itself as during FDR. It will take a mighty shock though. Trump will make things worse in the US. He is the wrecking ball. But at least he dialed down the confrontation with Russia. I really believe that otherwise we´d be headed for armageddon.
Agreed re Ukraine and the Imperial Warmongers.
Nuland and Sullivan and Blinken need to be arrested ASAP and a big show trial put on so we can explain to the West how the hell things are run!
But Yves is 100% right. Shits crazy expensive and it’s not gonna get any better. Im trying to buy a house in my local neighborhood and it’s nigh on impossible. Very easy to persuade the locals how life won’t get any better unless we have major political changes.
The people are conditioned to listen to people with “power” and confidence, so we gotta do it.
That nagging feeling TO ME is knowing and not doing. There’s a ton of dumb libs and neocons around here but they are slowly growing weary of their faith in Trump/MAGA just like I did with Obama in 2009/2010 with Healthcare shenanigans.
The Empire and their foreign spies control communication right now so that means we gotta do it face to face outside amongst ourselves and our neighbors.
Did sports figure Lawrence “Yogi” Berra really say, “You never know when something surprising will happen”? A reversal of current trends will be surprising, but on the other hand nothing lasts forever. A new birth of freedom? A return of sanity? A moral reawakening of the PMC? An appreciation of the seriousness of our situation? An understanding of what must be done in time to stave off the worst, and the will and capacity to do it?
I imagine an event in a large auditorium featuring Nate Hagens, of the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future, speaking on “The Great Simplification” — he concludes by saying “If we all work together, we can handle this.” But the audience is very sparse, and Bill Rees leans over and quietly says to Tom Murphy, “In other words, we’re hooped.”
Lots of things are falling apart. Some may continue to cohere. It is imaginable that not just talking apes, not just drawing apes, not just writing apes, not just printing apes, but maybe even typing apes will persist on the planet, making it through the “bottleneck” – the title of William Catton’s last book – even reviving global civilization a few centuries from now as Oreskes and Conway imagined in “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future.”
Or maybe not. The late Michael Dowd’s concept of “post-doom” – see the Wikipedia article – has been an inspiration to me as I try to live with awareness, and with love, and with an attempt to be cheerful and friendly in what I know are my own last few years and may or may not be the last decades or centuries of our species. The once forbidden “Gospel of Thomas” quotes Jesus as having said, “Don’t lie. Don’t do what you hate.”
And yes, this post is me trying to be cheerful and friendly.
Reality is wonderfully refreshing and EXCITING.
It’s literally the greatest story ever told and never ends!
You can’t make this stuff up!
Are we not approaching ww3 in real time? Lol, if Biden being “worse” as president makes you feel better, more power to you, but gives away your perception of u.s. politics as being very two dimensional.
As terrifying as Biden was (and the prospect of POTUS Harris, OMFG), Trump 2.0 is clearly the next step of imperial decline.
The big question is how long can the disinformational decay prevent the emergence of a new consensus?
At a minimum, a stock crash and long-term bear market is needed to break the spell, but all the stops will be pulled out to prevent that.
What if the stops, stopped?
hmm…
Stock crashes are the best times for fire sales, good if one is the arsonist.
Stock market ‘crashes’ are also propitious times for “Ready, Aim, Fire!” sales, ie. the expropriation of wealth. That can move in any direction, sometimes simultaneously.
There are good reasons for the more thoughtful of the elites building not just gated, but walled and defensible estates. They realize that they will be prime targets of “lower class” “move fast and break things” entrepreneurs.
One major reason why Phyl and I are looking hard for some small acreage out in the sticks to move to is that the urban area we presently inhabit is becoming increasingly unstable. I hear gunshots in the night at least every other night of late. All of the neighbours that I talk to privately admit to being “gunned up” out of fear of civil unrest. Not just a pistol by the bedside, but automatic or pump action shotguns and AR clone semi-automatic assault guns.
When real civil unrest does break out in America, the bloodletting will be monumental; think the mini civil wars in Germany that followed the end of World War One.
Stay safe, go grey, stack deep.
Ahso and alas.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht perished, and their social uplift aspirations lofted to a mist. Their heirs battled the nazis, but lost again.
Does history rhyme or repeat, or verve off to some un-known.
I am at a further loss to think of a focal center for my view of a left, in these lands.
Apropos to this general thread. :-/
Consider the status of Feminist Theory in America today. It seems that the same split between Working Women and Middle Class Feminists that we see today was present in the Russian Revolutionary Period.
See: https://jacobin.com/2017/05/women-workers-strike-russian-revolution-bolshevik-party-feminism
When the Class Struggle meets the Struggle to Survive, then we will see progress.
Stay safe. Be strong.
Somewhat on topic, it is an amazing achievement that you have been a consistent writer on here for … Twenty years? Seven days a week. You’ve seen a lot of evil and a lot of stupid.
On Ukraine and Russia, people will conclude that Russia won because the West lacked resolve. Its childish …
What is not sustainable will not be sustained.
Fin de siecle for so many ideas, processes and ways of being.
What an extraordinary privilege to be alive and aware at such a time.
Glory
Yes and No.
Yes
What’s the famous Chinese proverb on turbulent times? Oh yes, this one:
‘Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos’
寧為太平犬，不做亂世人
Melancholia, in a sense that the world of humans is irredeemable. I’ve been experiencing that.
Thank you, this is how I’m feeling it. The antidote-at-home here is the three cats, eternal optimists they, that bounce up and down on me each and every dawn, demanding recognition of a brand new day, and some breakfast.
Thanks Yves.
Thank you, mrsyk and Alice X, for your posts, and thank you, Yves, for saying what so many of us are feeling. I don’t have the words for how I’m feeling.
That’s another good movie, involving the end of the world and some very negative views on life. But in Melancholia the end is unavoidable, a collision of planets. The situation as Yves described is clearly the outcome of choices: bad ones. On the one had that’s dismal but on the other we’re not entirely out of choices, if we had any real democracy or competent, decent leaders to make them. What we may be out of is the time to make better choices and corrections but we don’t know that for sure just yet.
Oh yes, very much recommended von Trier film Melancholia. The best presentation of depression I’ve seen and quite a spectacular movie.
I wasn’t thinking of the movie but the mood. I’ve seen the movie, much of the dialogue was improvised (iirc) and thereby chaotic, losing focus of the larger theme. But then losing focus of the larger theme is something of a natural for humanity, given that the power elites would have it that way.
That the moral sensibility which engenders such melancholy even exists at all within us is to me a wonder beyond all reckoning, and cause for at least the faintest glimmer of optimism.
That’s the break glass in case of emergency switch in humans.
You have put into words what I feel is the state of the world but what drives my anxiety my friends and family do not feel the same unease. Most think it will pass when Trump dies or his term ends.
I like my wishful thinking, and I see the passing of the older (senile) political cohort as a necessary step to get to what’s next. Maybe what’s next will be worse. Who wants to see the negative effects of climate change decades “ahead of schedule”.
But we’re talking about the decadence of the current political elites. The institutional corrosion is frightening. But the despair is the sense the current group (system?) is incapable of any other course. The spell needs to be broken and that will only happen by a generational shift.
Thank you for this handy summary of some features of our state of play and for its sorta confessional framing.
I remember thinking La Grande Bouffe was quite funny but I don’t remember when I saw it. Probably during the Netflix DVD era. I doubt my mum took me to see it in 73 when I was 8.
I think your job might have something to do with this. I don’t want to encourage you to do less of it because what would I do without you? but I have in the past suggested that NC could take vacations. Vacations can be recuperative and emboldening and I doubt many of us would begrudge NC staff them.
There’s a lot to think about and discuss regarding how politics and governance got to the position we’re in. So much I’m not able to organize my thoughts here in a comment. But my feelings encompass disgust but also rage at the betrayal.
I did see La Grande Bouffe, in a movie theater and as an adult, and I found it hilarious. No description can quite capture how gross it is, and how grotesque. It is, to say the least, disconcerting — unthinkable?– to find Life mirroring Art on such a grand, pervasive scale.
I find a certain parallel these days in the tv production of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses. Checking back with the books occasionally, I find that the author’s level of disgust and distrust in not just the security services, but the entire government, breathes through every line. Yet in the (sleight of) hands of the wonderfully trained and gifted British actors, the show turns the crises into a sort of nuanced slapstick. Again, hilarious.
Draw what conclusions you will….
Slow Horses – Golden Globe Awards coming up. We really like that show.
Hope Trump doesn’t take it over like Kennedy Center Honors. That word “Golden” just triggers something in him. The problem is Trump is bored. He needs all hands on deck to keep him occupied by something other than destroying America.
Obviously I am responding to reviews, and some who saw it in theaters did find it funny. My guess is that that reaction would come easier with a smaller image. I generally prefer seeing movies in a theater because you have to see it as intended (you can’t hit pause to alleviate discomfort) and the larger image means a more intense, immersive experience. It would IMHO be much easier to distance oneself from the grossness on a home screen.
Yesterday afternoon the question of our healthcare catastrophe came up when I was with two physicians. One of them asked “What is healthcare and how can you even fix something like that?” He travels the world and has two other houses that I know about. The other, also rich but aware, remained silent. I just made a note to myself to keep my distance in the future and concentrate on other possible responses. The guy with the rhetorical question would have been one of the local community leaders with some sense of community and consequences of having none when I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s. Everyone knew back then which local “leaders” were not to be trusted, and they knew that we knew, and that provided protection after a fashion.
I’m a nurse, and read your writing with some interest, KLG. After reading a recent piece of yours on primary care with my spouse, a nursing student, we posed the question, “What is the future of healthcare?” My spouse’s immediate response: “Healthcare has no future. It was invented by MBAs to consolidate profit centers from such a wide variety of not necessarily related things. It’s a bubble. Medicine may be able to be saved if we’re determined enough about saving it, but not healthcare.”
Thank you, boots! Your spouse’s response explains our “healthcare” predicament in two sentences! I will use it with permission, with attribution, of course.
Thanks for this post, it really resonates with the broader mood among folks I know who pay attention. One of the aspects of this that is so galling is how many of the Democrat elites, the supposed “opposition”, are really relishing all this. The Schumer/Pelosi types clearly see the violence and chaos visited upon the broad masses as deserved for not voting for their chosen avatar, and seem gleeful at the chance to sit on their hands while the ingrates who protested against the complicity in genocide or demanded solutions to inflation get crushed by state violence and extreme austerity. None of this is necessarily surprising to those of us who’ve watched closely how the DNC types happily serve Wall Street and the MIC, but it’s demotivating and encourages a sense of deep nihilism in those being hit by the effects. The idea that this will all send people running back to the Dems is in for a rude awakening as millions give up on politics and the government all together and focus inward on whatever they can do to scrape by in this ever worsening economy.
Scattered elements of grassroots local resistance are inspiring, but I fear the much larger swath of regular people will see little hope in it making the change they need and tune out. There’s always another billionaire funded influencer to tell them to blame their problems on immigrants, trans people, or China. Even if these become less effective at creating reactionary converts, demobilizing and keeping people scattered and demoralized still serves the goals of those at the top. Hard to find a lot to be optimistic about these days.
StevePVD, I agree with much of what you say, but men who claim to be women cause a lot of trouble for women: we can’t claim to be aware of or concerned with women’s rights if we can’t even say who the women are. There are 2 sexes and most of the time it doesn’t matter, but when it does, it does. Girls and women need and deserve single-sex spaces and sports.
Men being able to enter women’s changing rooms and bathrooms is not a civil rights issue: it’s good old-fashioned sexism, and denies women the ability to say no to men, even those who really, really want to be there. Tying this to other issues will only turn off more people who understand that there are 2 sexes and that women need and deserve the ability to define ourselves and to have single-sex spaces and sports.
If somehow a leader came down the pike who was for the most part honest in his or her communications with us, we’ve gotten to the point, where it would make us highly suspicious of their actions, it being such a foreign concept.
It pains me that we are at this juncture~
The world is always crucifying Christ.
Dear Yves, Thank you for this. I’ve been following your site from the beginning and have seen highs and lows in your commentary, but the lows were always tempered with the idea that we have the ability to reverse economic stupidity if we acknowledge it for what it is. Like you I worry that the elites are “poisoning the well” and this disaster will cause much more harm than the usual downturns. Please keep up the good work. It is appreciated. Knowledge is power.
Informational Force-Feeding — I’m going to steal this!
I’ve followed NC since ~2008, but only finished reading ‘Econned’ last night. I was in a bit of despair while reading Yves’ sensible recommendations for effective reform (e.g. limit guarantees, reduced system connectedness, tough punishments,…) and seeing how much they haven’t come to pass. We are in trouble and things seem to be getting worse.
That said, I am grateful for what Yves has built here, a community of critical thinkers. Whatever gives you hope, I hope you (and I) find it in our daily work.
This post really resonated. I find it harder and harder to get motivated. For me it is:
1) I can’t trust anything “reported” in the Western Media or said by Western Governments. I spend huge amounts of time trying to deduce “what is really going on.” I get the impression that media and government don’t even really care if we even believe them anymore. As long as they have a cover story, they are happy. And they don’t care if the “cover story” is believable or not.
2) Problems, for myself and those I love, are proliferating faster than I can track them – much less deal with them. I find myself triaging problems rather than dealing with them as they arise.
3) Societal systems are breaking down – health care, education, insurance, home repair, appliance repair, purchases of necessities are increasingly unaffordable, and even if affordable, are increasingly dysfunctional. Often goods and services are more harmful than beneficial. And customer service does not realistically exist. Infrastructure is breaking down before my eyes.
4) Security systems have become so elaborate and “safe portals” are so difficult to deal with that they are far less efficient than what existed prior to the digital age.
5) The “leadership class” seems to live in a powerpoint world which bears little resemblance to reality.
The whole thing just grinds a person down.
Deb from Jersey agrees with you. Good breakdown.
Revulsion, exhaustion, depression, yes yes yes.
Building community helps, and NC is a community. Thanks to all of you for that. (Especially Yves.)
My hopeful side says we are on the verge of huge changes that will reset the board; the current paths can only fail. Each of us keeping ourselves functioning through self care and whatever else we can is going to be crucial.
The ice ages killed off the largest beasts, the wooly mammoths and so on, but small furry animals survived. So I aspire to be a small furry animal, aiming to survive this long winter.
Best…H
For both you and Wuk above: Chipmunks!
A very deep thanks for all your writing and efforts that keep this site available as a daily dose of sanity. Most people I know are in deep denial of what is going on or are terribly misled by the mainstream.
This daily dose of rationality and sanity helps more than you can imagine.
I hear you, Yves, and I’m feeling the same way. In recent weeks I’ve cut down on a lot of podcasts I normally listen to because it’s just the same horror show day after day, with the stupidity and venality of what passes for leadership ever on the increase. It is grotesque.
I haven’t seen La Grande Bouffe either, but I have seen the John Waters classic Pink Flamingos. I’d say we’ve reached that even higher echelon of decadence.
At this point i am unable to conceptualize these events in any rational way. Accordingly, i have come to “think of it as evolution in action”. h/t Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
I’m not far away from where the survivors were in Lucifer’s Hammer~
I think JP is much closer.
America is going great,,,”best year ever” and it only gets brighter in the coming new year…just nevermind those AI dissident bogeymen, or the economy analysts who might be spooky unbelievers of those magical lower priced goods. \ sarc
Added, if I’m thinking of the time of the movie above being released, I think that Soylent Green was also out somewhere along in the early 70s. Talk about dystopian hell and a horrid outlook for a future world or future in America….But I am equally convinced there is no one in charge or at the ship’s wheel, R or D.
Johnny Cash, The Man Comes Around is a worthwhile listen in such times.
Yves, thanks for the link to Andrew Coyne’s screed. Sadly it fizzled with me toward the end with the obligatory Putin Derangement Syndrome, anti-China and ultra pro-Ukraine bias that plagues the mainstream Canadian media and affects a majority of the public view here; enough to cause one U.S. commentator to label the whole nation “Banderaist Canada”.
Gorilla Radio based in Victoria is a bit more sane and objective. The Canadian political and bureaucratic elites are just masquerading, but behind close doors they are still enacting the same approach that was imposed on Canadians after the 1812 war, right wing governments and censorship.
https://gradio.substack.com/
Dougal Lamont’ substack (a former liberal MLA from Manitoba) hits the right notes with economic criticism of Carney, but he also got the Putin dernagement symptom.
It illustrated today’s principle of the political being personal. That is, nothing is systemic or institutional—if we’re in deep shit, it’s because of Trump’s personal qualities abstracted from anything systemic or institutional that would select for those qualities. And the solution is to install someone in power who is personally upright according to PMC standards, ignoring how PMC virtues play out in any systemic or institutional context.
Yes indeed. Very well put.
That is the approach here in Australia. Everyone I know ridicules Trump and expects things to get back to normal once he is gone.
A very stupid and shallow way of looking at things. It does make you feel highly morally superior though, which is part of the point probably.
In Canada, all national political actors must ritualistically genuflect towards the Ukrainian diaspora. The ridiculous apotheosis of this was the embarrassing spectacle of a standing ovation for an actual Nazi in our parliament not so long ago.
It is a serious problem.
How many Chuks could a Canuck chuck if a Canuck could chuck Chuks?
Thank you Yves. Thank you for the essays, the news, the newsletter, the links, the stories, the anecdotes, the fantastic community. All this quality work. I am grateful. I don’t know what comes next, we may have gone too far to continue muddling through, but it all will pass. Hopefully your dispirited malaise and disgust first.
Thanks for this post. I’d compare our current age to Erich von Stroheim’s famous 1924 silent movie Greed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greed_(1924_film)
Greed. Neoliberal economics and ideology is how we got here, imo.
Greed kills: friendship, love, marriage, life itself. The final scene of the movie : utube, 4 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hvzfz9eBgA
Beautiful and poignant analysis, Yves. All of us have been feeling it but few have the ability and the fortitude to express it. Having the sense that we are not alone in our misgivings is a tremendous accomplishment and a foundation for further progress.
This sentence resonated with me:
I think earlier ages had the advantage of an obvious mission that prevailed at the time. Whether it was ending a war, overcoming a financial calamity, ridding society of a disease, or glorying in and exploiting a new set of human discoveries, there was a reason and a feeling that all of us were pulling in the same direction, and that that was the right thing to be doing. Whether or not this was actually true, it was important that there be a broad sense that it was true and that society had a unified purpose to a great extent.
Now, be it late stage capitalism or for some other reason, the leaders of the states have hitched their wagon to corporate leaders, whose one and only goal is to make some number go up. This is an inspiring motivation for a few thousand CEOs, but is completely pointless to the other 8 billion inhabitants of the Earth. The resultant feeling of listlessness and pointlessness is hard to escape.
Nihilism is absolutely The descriptive term for the present ruling ascendancy. However depressing this might be, this should NOT be misdiagnosed as a depressive disorder, or a sign of “death cult” thinking. Rather the exact opposite: The Nihilism of a ruling class only energises their predatory behaviour. With morality and proibty gone, their actions become unrestrained.
Though they may be being sadistic and (for the state) stupid, in fact all these actions are rational psychopathy. Our system and way of life is simy being looted, liquidated, by nihilistic elites out for themselves and the devil take the rest. In fact, sell the rest to the devil for meat, booze, and gas. Tomorrow is but an idea to a nihilist, and the people in it, including ultimately themselves.
Part of the problem is our own inability now to address corruption and increasingly outright evil. We lack a common moral or ethical framework in which to appeal, in part because nihilism has torn down old ways of right and wrong. Our institutions now operate by the laws of fiat and one by one will begin to eat others to survive.
Our job is to present and alternative, often the past. Most of our core problems are not new, and solutions involve reform, which involves where necessary diverting rivers for certain filthy stables. A doctor’s duty is to keep prescribing treatment to the drug addict, not matter how often they decline it.
P.s. Twitter likewise has descended into total nihilism. Problems are called out, but solutions are rare and mostly scorned. To actually get out of our present poly crisis, people are going to have to find actually productive intellectual salons, online or off.
Imo, the Supreme Court’s (wrongly decided, imo) Citizen’s United decision has had as bad an effect on our politics as their earlier Dred Scott decision in 1857.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford
Dred Scott was eventually overturned. I hope Citizens United will one day be overturned. The sooner, the better.
Agree. When I finish listing all the problems that we discuss on this site to family and friends they will ask me what can we do? I say get the money out of elections. Do that first and maybe we can do some other things after.
It’s naive I know, because they will find other ways to stay in power, but it’s a start.
Thanks to Yves for capturing the Zeitgeist.
“How can they still be relying on Ukraine propaganda?”
My guess is that was always going to be a cynical way to give Ukraine some agency in decisions to keep throwing bodies into the meat grinder.
Need more coffee to venture into other issues raised.
As I like to point out and will continue to do so, when the feedback loops don’t have any circuit breakers, it all goes spiraling into the black hole in the middle. This is basic physics.
Reality is that feedback between synchronization and harmonization. Nodes and networks. Organisms and ecosystems.
As these multicellular organisms, the nervous system coordinates all the cells and organs into one fairly coherent entity. The circulation system sustains harmony across this ecosystem of cells and organs.
In that states function as social super organisms, government is the nervous system, while money and banking are the blood and circulation system.
He have evolved enough to understand that as government has to serve the entire society and not just those at the top, that it’s a public utility. We have not yet come to see the same principle applies to banking.
It all might seem monumental to us, but we are just cells in the process and this is a hiccup in the grand scheme of things. The banks are having their let them eat cake moment.
As a fresh faced American kid looking to work in movies, this writer was on the set of “La Grande Bouffe” in that villa in the 16th. For one week. The French producer who had just hired me, told me to go and watch; be very discreet with my questions and above all don’t get in the way. On the second day, I looked to my left and thought, ‘Holy Shit, that’s Catherine Deneuve two feet away’. (She came to the set to see her then-partner, Marcello Mastroianni). Phillipe Noiret and Michel Piccoli were then very well-known actors coming into their prime. My observations of the director, Marco Ferreri, convinced me that he was a minor figure–in the midst of an amazing wealth of talent among Italian directors at that time. He was an opportunistic salon communist who one day in the production office endlessly repeated a mantra, “Je veux de l’argent”.
The finished movie is, as you note, an elegy to nihilistic disgust. Not terribly important, even as an outlier, in the cinema history of the period.
To your points in the essay: Yes, it’s damn hard to maintain one’s sanity while trying to keep up with the mostly transparent machinations of the international misleadership class. Disgust, anger, and despair come readily every day. It helps to be in a relatively safe bubble, with some worthwhile physical activity, and with some innocent creatures close by.
I could add more, but am late for an appointment right now. Thank you for this piece. While none of us knows how this will turn out, it helps to be aware of the dysfunction that we live in, and to have some anchors for the coming storm.
In a former life I was a projectionist for a small art house cinema. I watched this film through just once. Funny some but deeply disturbing in a hollow way. I found myself timing the reels so I’d see the bare minimum at change over. Ick.
ZOMG what a small world. As Lambert said, NC has the best commentariat.
Yves, I’m not trying to hijack anything but would it be possible to get an update an how Mr. Strether is enjoying his “retirement” if he is willing to reveal that? I do miss the pictures that accompanied his posts but grateful for the wonderful replacements you have found.
I also appreciate this post very much. I have found that all I can do is just participate in being kind and helpful to others. I think someone had said long ago on this site that change will only come from the bottom up. I happen to think no great changes will occur until this system we have now collapses in a smoldering pile of stink and maybe then we have a chance to start anew.
Thanks again and thanks to all the commenters.
I also occasionally think of LS, and hope he is well.
Ah, ‘salon communist’. That is a new term to me.
Defined as : the salon communist is a person who is enthusiastic about the theories of communism, but in practice he only represents them, provided that he does not suffer personal disadvantages.
I think that it was John Lennon of the Beatles who said that he would become a Communist after he made his first million.
In grad school one of my professors (teaching Modern British satire) used the term “the parlour pinks” for this phenomenon.
Some perspective is in order. Consider the War on Terror. Consider the Indochina war, certainly way more evil than anything Trump has done or likely will do. Consider world wars I and II. Consider the U.S. Civil War. Consider Europe’s wars of religion. Consider the institution of slavery and its millennia of deep evil. It seems the farther back you go, the more evil is on display. We are sensitized to current evils because we are information saturated, not because the evils are historically unprecedented.
Except for the Civil war, those evils were inflicted on foreigners, and the rebels arguably chose to make themselves foreigners, unsuccessfully. Our leaders are now openly visiting them on fellow citizens.
The open corruption and violence, while horrible and horribly demoralizing, has the positive effect of educating the population on the depth of the gutter that western leaders lie in. Their propaganda becomes laughable to anyone making even a minor an effort to understand our realities. Perhaps a new systemic beginning after whatever catastrophe energizes the mass.
In the US politics it was the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that let loose this monster of unlimited political
briberydonations, imo, leading to the now kept men and women in politics doing what they’re told by their biggest donors.But what if that is the plan? Here is my take on that:
Like you, I am aghast at the damage being done. But I think Trump is just a tool – a tool the elites get a laugh out of using.
Yes to this clear and well-written comment. It is not Trump, he is simply the clownish tool. And it is not just people in the US who are endangered – we’re seeing the destruction of the rule of law world wide.
Thanks for this percipient comment, John Brewster. I hear you.
Thank you for this essay and the daily work of NC that you and everyone else involved – past and present – do for your readers. It is a heavy load. I’ve spent 40 years in broadcast news in the U.S., most of it at the national level. There have been a handful of times in which I felt the information was coming too fast to keep up, too fast to do the job decently, too fast to give the user what they needed. The 2000 election, the days after 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, pandemic year one with election sideshow – these come to mind. There is a sense of being overwhelmed, exasperated, exhausted, useless, and hopeless. We are in another of those times. In this case, the information seems to come less quickly, but what comes is of greater consequence. The stakes now are the future of what’s left of our system. It is a system that makes change – yes, slow change – possible but that is under attack. I try to remind myself that the current situation is not about Trump but about the movement that inevitably generated such a figure. The movement ought to be the focus, and what to do about it. Which is not likely to make anyone feel better. All I can say to Yves is again, thank you, and know that you’re not alone in this revulsion.
Ha! I’d not heard of La Grande Bouffe before reading this but am very aware that, now in my mid-seventies, I am essentially killing time until time kills me – and have sometimes given half-serious consideration to suicide by cream-bun.
I blame Milton Friedman and his whole mantra that only owner interests are important, that community/society, even country is not. I see that as the beginning of neoliberalism/self is all, each just for his or her own.
Personally, while I fully agree with your list, I would add the foreign wars/genocide/murdering survivors in the water after blowing up their boat for much of my angst and frustration, along with the concept that only the us has value, and only the wealthy subset of our population does.
But that subset cannot support the economy on its own no matter however many chips are bought and warehoused. Wife and I are still trying to wrap our minds around the idea chip sales exceed consumer spending… but gdp grew just 1-2%. So if these chips aren’t gonna be used before they’re obsolete they shouldn’t be counted, right? And what does that mean for actual economic growth? Imagine a market crash/recession from here… neg interest rates not gonna work if a quarter are unemployed, something we haven’t seen for nearly a century.
I very much like the tone of this article and have myself been feeling news-caused de-motivation because one sees prevalent nihilism which goes from the PMC to the populaces. Emmanuel Todd does a good job analysing this though I believe the lack of moral compass is not only rooted in the absence of religion as Todd argues but in the substitution of religion with dangerous substitutes such as “free markets”, classic or neoclassic economics and all that associated BS which is religious matter in the sense that you have to hold beliefs which are not anchored with the realities of the world.
Then you note the decline of noblesse oblige and some think that this makes this period worse than the Gilded Age. So yes nihilism becoming more and more extreme and this is very dangerous because stuff that was unthinkable a couple of decades ago is now being put on the table. The only positive thing I can think about Trump is that he has been able to keep contact with Putin though it is very unlikely that this will result in any practical outcome.
I’m part of a group that meets weekly to discuss how to respond to the current madness, and importantly for mutual self care. Not surprisingly, we have had little luck in finding ways to stem the tide. There is solace in knowing there are others who recognize what is happening, though, and this essay helps.
Thank you for writing, and for keeping the site going.
For film analogy, La Grande Bouffe seems to me more of a prescient look at what the democrats have become since Clinton. Rather than an indictment of politics generally.
As to the republicans, that’s more of a Salo feel. They never seem to want to self-destruct, just inflict suffering on others.
For apparatchiks of either Party, I suggest Bertolucci’s “The Conformist,” from 1970.
As for MAGA gone wrong, try “Mephisto” from 1981.
The Conformist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conformist_(1970_film)
Mephisto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephisto_(1981_film) As for our wonderful neoliberal paradise that is aborning, try “Missing,” from 1982, and “State of Siege” from 1972.
It is not as if we weren’t warned long ago.
[Insert comment eaten by Ye Internet Dragons here.]
Roughly speaking, we have been warned about today’s trajectory for decades. Just film works on the theme: “Missing,” “State of Siege,” “The Conformist,” “A Very British Coup,” etc. etc.
“We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball. What bothers me isn’t that fraud is not nice or that fraud is mean. It’s that, for 15,000 years, fraud and short-sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once.”
Mark Baum in The Big Short describing the financial environment preceding The Crash of 2008
It’s only become worse
Thank you for the post Yves, in a perverse way it uplifted my spirits. It is bad, and likely it will get worse in 25+ years (just thinking of accelerating climate change here), but it is still not that bad. True, Trump is a disgusting human being that is hard to stomach. I can only look and listen to some that imitate him, my son, or that guy from China), but cannot stand his face and his puckering of lips and waxing and whinging on how everyone is taking advantage of the US.
And the sycophantism is really something to behold. Only autocratic times have experienced such emissions of unadultearted sychophantism. Tip of the hat to Xi Jinping here.
I am reading now quite excitedly Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China and that period was indeed a world ending time for the Chinese, who experienced similar world ending times several times before. I was impressed by the multitudes of youngones joining the commies, from all over China, just picking their trousers and marching northwest.
The US now?! It will just loose its luster and maybe, maybe, finally, the Americans will accept they are made of the same shit like averyone else. And to be honest, it is not even that high a perch to fall from. It is high just in the minds of most of the Americans.
And look, there are therapeutic things to watch and listen to. Check this young woman (she is amazing), from Ohio, how she manages to feed a family of 6 out of a 1/8th of an acre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz7OVfaYeSA
Great, uplifting link, Kouros, thank you.
Yes, thanks for sharing this link.
Thanks for sharing! What amazing work.
Thank you for the excellent essay, Yves. I don’t have much to add besides that it’s been hard following the news these days: extremely dispiriting among the news of genocide, ecological catastrophe, financial crisis, sabre-ratting and war. Maybe the old spiel about “living in interesting times” really was a curse. My limited time parsing the news is always nearly spent here; if I must do it, then it might as well be in the best place to do so.
Okay, it’s time. Play this. Loud.
Yves, this post and excellent comments ranks up there in the top 5 for NC – IMO. Maybe you could pin it at the top of the archives page and allow comments to continue?
Thank you
“What is so upsetting is the underlying pervasive nihilism…”
As highlighted by Yves and expanded on by the comment of Balan Roxdale, as well as Ignacio mentioning the insights of Emmanuel Todd on his 3-stage process of secularization in the West, we have entered into the era of nihilism, the era of no values, and the era of nothingness except the urge to destroy.
Such nihilism is now so deep in the West (Europe and the U.S.) that we seem less and less capable of articulating any new visions, policies, or effective steps towards new collective forms of behavior.
This reality of accelerating nihilism and war-mongering and the search for explanations for this phenomenon also reveals the inadequacies of our favorite theoretical models/explanations.
More typical geo-political or economic interpretations do not seem capable of grasping the dynamics of nihilism. The dimensions of personal psychology, different types of family system upbringings (nuclear family, extended families), as well as the role of religious belief in creating vibrant cultures, also seem more and more important for understanding the reality of our present situation.
But, at this moment, irrationality seems in the driver’s seat with all our present theoretical models of explanation lagging far behind.
In Northrop Frye’s framework we are deep into the “Winter” phase — the time of irony and satire and the absence of the hero.
Hopefully there really is a cycle, as the Bronze Age civilizations believed, rather than the infantile Whiggish illusion of endless “progress” …
Juvenal
Thank you Ms. Smith.
Revulsion is the perfect description for this seemingly unending stream of the grotesque. I suppose that’s why I miss those bygone days of “WASP-y” men seemingly running things above board.
Your quip “Information Force Feeding” is also very apropos given the vast influence operations that the light is being shone on.
Keep up the good work.
Apropos of Nothing:
Sir Humphrey Dumpty sat in Whitehall.
Sir Humphrey Dumpty had a great fall.
All the Kings forces and all the Kings men,
Couldn’t put Humphrey on top of the ladder again.
Jonathan Swift’s “Greased Pole of Preferment” comes to mind.
When you see characters like Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer as the face of the Government, you know that we have entered the Age of Post Rational Governance.
Well, I never saw La Grande Bouffe, but I did see the 1983 Monty Python movie Meaning of Life, where a glutton named Mr. Creosote literally explodes after an enormous disgusting meal. I am not sure boredom was the key there, but certainly Monty Python was well aware of rampant gratuitous barbarism. For those who want a religious slant on all this, you might want to consider 1 Timothy 6:6-10, which includes the famous line “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”
For those of a more secular bend, I recommend economic historian Michael Hudson’s 2018 book …and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee YearThe invention of debt opened Pandora’s box freeing the rich man’s dream of unleashing soul-crushing misery in the pursuit of wealth. As the subtitle indicates, the inventors realized the problem, and so also invented clean slates. Then the Greeks and Romans got wind of it, and invented “debts must be paid.” So we do sort of get back to religion, because Hudson has Jesus declaring himself king, and starting his reign by invoking the ancient custom of declaring a clean slate (the acceptable year of the Lord). Which neither rich Jews nor rich Romans approved, so, spoiler alert, Jesus was crucified.
Yves, just finished reading this, not having time in the morning. Thank you! You’ve completely captured the sense of despair, disgust, utter revulsion as each day brings another slammer even worse than that of the day before. And thanks as well for the Zitron video, and the Coyne piece.
La Grand Bouffe may have been shocking in the 1970s, but today I would consider it harmless.
It’s intended as a satire on an intellectually and morally depraved bourgeoisie, which is why even the hired prostitutes leave the house in disgust.
A film that, in my opinion, reflects the current situation is Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, except that the scenes no longer take place in remote castles in the mountains or on Lake Garda, but on Caribbean islands.
And as for melancholy: to be an isolated individual cut off from all social influence and yet helplessly exposed to the effects of that society: whoever doesn’t lose their mind over this has none to lose (to quote G. E. Lessing).
Yves thank you – it has been increasingly difficult to roll through the links – knowing that you have the stomach and the intestinal fortitude to continue doesn’t give me hope but feels like a kindred soul is out there in the dismal reality in which we are surrounded – will be able to send a check this month – can only hope the disgust you must feel viscerally doesn’t overcome you – thanks again – and now on to 12/9 and seeing what you have shared with us –
Dean Yates was the Reuters Bureau Chief in Iraq at the time of the July 12, 2007 “Collateral Murders” massacre of civilians, including two Reuters employees, that Manning and Assange ultimately exposed. It proved highly traumatic for him, the damage exacerbated by being lied to for years by the US military as he tried to investigate what really happened and why.
Yates embarked on an effort to understand the impacts of “moral injury”, which can but doesn’t always co-exist with PTSD. Yates describes it as a wound to the soul when an individual’s moral or ethical values are trounced by betrayal of what’s right by one in authority, or by witnessing and failing to prevent such glaring moral transgressions.
I imagine that for some surviving it means desensitizing, or averting one’s gaze from what is before us.
A sense of helplessness cultivating numbness and pliability is likely part of playbook employed by Trump, Bibi and other brutal authoritarians.
Moral injury seems a plague coming for many of us.
OMG, Yves…revulsion….is it coincidence that “revulsion” was the final word I came up with several weeks ago, in an informal contest to find the most apropos descriptor for our government and their Masters in these most interesting times? We are cursed…. the End Times: end of something… beginning of ???
oafstradamus
Yves, Safari browser would not show this article, maybe it is found to be offensive somehow? I will share it by sneakernet, etc.
Thanks….
oaf
:(
Revulsion is a good word for it.
Despair, disbelief, frustration, anger too.
I used to read most articles here and skim most links. I have to ration myself now to a handful of links and an article a day – a self preservation mechanism mentally. (alongside 3 cats and a very very analogue puppy).
I don;t know how you do it day after day. it’s a relentless torrent of “oh they really went there” and “how can people be so stupid about X” and “why are we ignoring Y”. Systemically bad high consequence decisions day after day. (like NSPM-7 – still not picked up by uk media properly).
Like the capitol and districts in the hunger games books perhaps, or more ancient empire examples
look after yourself, same for the readers, commenters.